Cheese and Ethics

Philosophers often talk about “the” good, as if it were a singular thing.  Sometimes that gets thinkers in trouble.  Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. Some kind of balance among multiple elements was always at work for them.  Plato thought in terms of a good society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the diverse elements.  Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.”   A flourishing life involves multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends,  some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, along with a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia, as a result, was always a complex affair.

After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of goodness.  As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, is the most pleasant life.  The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.  

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn.  Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium--all of these arose from what was outside us.  The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasureable, minimally disturbed, life.  The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston : “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Religion added another ingredient.   This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split.  Manichaeism  described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable.   

Evil and good had physical manifestations.  Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become monks.  Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats.  Women labelled witches felt this wrath, as did heretics.  Later writers traced political problems to “parasites”, either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them) or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

I thought of all this when recently visiting an artisanal cheese-making operation, the Kennebec Cheesery in the Belgrade lakes region of Maine. This particular place is homey.  It’s a farmhouse, with lots of  land, goats, sheep, a delivery of manure the day I was there (good fertilizer).  Also, plenty of bugs, some visible, others invisible, still others in refrigerated packets.  The invisible ones are mostly bacteria.  Within the Manichean disposition, bacteria fall under the “evil-to-be-exterminated” category.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E-Coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial.  Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health.  Better to work with them. This is where the refrigerated packets come in handy.  The packets house bugs with names that can sound foreboding like streptococcus thermophilus, or lactobacillus casei. Others, have more recognizable labels,  penicillium roqueforti,  penicillium camemberti. Instead of aiming at elimination, cheese makers actually welcome these “germs.”  The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics, i.e. the inward turn, was doubly problematic.   (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence.  (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode, that is, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered unilaterally and unequivocally evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus,  lactobacillus,  penicillium, we can work together.  We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move.  Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable.  Viruses?  Not eliminate, but Integrate. (We call this vaccination.)  Bacteria?  Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix.  Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize, bring to helpful fruitions. Make cheese.  Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about  the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger.  The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.